This Thing Called Life

A journalist "draws from his recollections, notes and tapes, to paint an illuminating and intimate portrait of a supremely talented and complex artist" (Newsweek).

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when he became the artist formerly known as Prince. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote "3 Chains o' Gold," Prince's "rock video opera," as well as the star's last testament, which may be buried with Prince's will underneath Prince's private compound, Paisley Park.


According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was "the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like." Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar's life.


Before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis's mostly-segregated Northside. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life.


"Peculiar, intriguing, lyrical. An earnest vamp on Prince's life." —Kirkus Reviews